Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Okay, perhaps she can wait to ask a question and let me answer Deputy Boyd Barrett.

On affordable housing, when this Government came into office no affordable homes were offered at all. The Deputy knows that. Last year, 1,757 housing solutions were delivered on affordable housing. This year the figure will be more than 6,000. I am not claiming success or that we have dealt with every challenge and every issue, absolutely not. Unquestionably, to get to grips with what still remains a massive challenge in housing, we need to increase the supply of social, affordable and private homes.

In Deputy Boyd Barrett's constituency, 597 homes are being delivered on the Shanganagh Castle site, which Deputy Devlin and others know well, by the Land Development Agency, which did not have legislation when we came into government and did not have any capital. The LDA delivered almost 1,000 homes last year and will deliver more than that this year. A flagship estate is being built there.

In my constituency of Dublin Fingal, 1,200 homes are being delivered in Ballymastone, of which 253 are social and 253 are affordable. I could give loads of examples and the Deputy knows about them. Although we are building all those properties, we still have more to do because people enter homelessness and emergency accommodation for a variety of reasons, as the Deputy also outlined. We have to make sure we have a safety net for them and good quality, emergency accommodation from which people can exit more quickly. We are doing that now. In quarter 2 alone, 630 households exited into safe and secure homes. That is why we have to continue to increase the output, especially of social housing. We will meet our target this year and we will meet and exceed the social housing target. As I speak today, we have almost 25,000 social housing units in the pipeline. It is unprecedented, although Deputy Joan Collins and others might disagree with that, it is simply a fact. We are delivering more social homes now than have been delivered in 50 years. Do we need to do more? Yes, of course we do.

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